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Haiti: The Army was able to save her life in all likelihood #HaitiDrDispatch


I received the following email from Anil on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 05:26 (am). He wrote it at the end of his sixth full day in Haiti. I've made minor spelling and grammar corrections and have tried my best to fill in missing words. I've added hyperlinks where I thought they might help.

Haiti: Our first blood transfusion #HaitiDrDispatch

Our first blood transfusion

One of the first people I looked for was a beautiful 5 year old girl with bllateral femur fractures and a hematocrit of 15. She would receive our first blood transfusion (a special effort from the Haitian Red Cross) and would be on the top of my list to get to the USNS Comfort (a hospital that floats). 

The Army was able to save her life in all likelihood by air evacuation to the Comfort (which could handle neurosurgery, [Intensive Care Unit], CT scans, and fix many of the complicated orthopedic fractures that had to remain broken in our beds due to lack of Intramedullary Rods, fluroscopy, and other hardware.

Anil S Menon

Sent from iPhone

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Anil Menon, MD is a clinical instructor at Stanford School of Medicine focused on surgery and emergency medicine. His research interests are Aerospace Medicine, Emergency Medicine, and Wilderness Medicine. He graduated from Stanford Med in 2006, received a degree in mechanical engineering in 2003 and became a full ER doctor in 2009. He has practiced medicin in combat in Afghanistan and will be practicing aerospace medicine next year at NASA. Menon is a flight surgeon assigned to the 173rd Fighter Wing (F-15s) of the Oregon Air National Guard, and he's part of a team sent to Haiti by Stanford.

This entire series is chronicled under the HaitiDrDispatch tag